Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

The Whole Applicant

BROAD LENS Jim Conroy of New Trier High School counseling Richard Strzok and his father on strategy.Credit
Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

PATRICIA B. TAYLOR, an assistant principal at Rye High School in Westchester County, N.Y., noticed the shift a few years ago. Public colleges and universities that were once content to crunch grade-point averages and SAT scores suddenly wanted more. They began asking for essays and recommendations, wanting to understand the academic rigor — or lack thereof — behind an applicant’s coursework.

“What fortifies it for me is that they will call and ask a question about a particular student,” Ms. Taylor says. “When you look at an application holistically you have a clearer picture of who that student is.”

Across the country, selective public colleges and universities are taking a page from their private counterparts and implementing what is commonly called a holistic or comprehensive admissions process.

The trend is partly a function of rising application numbers at sought-after publics, which is a result, in turn, of the climbing cost of private higher education and a peaking population of high school seniors. Many applicants, it seems, easily meet academic requirements. Merely pushing average grades and test scores ever higher won’t necessarily yield the most vibrant student body.

It also counters the wave of grade inflation in American high schools that makes ranking applicants by a numerical index “more problematic,” says Philip Ballinger, director of admissions at the University of Washington, whose office “took the plunge” with the holistic approach five years ago.

For large public institutions, the shift is labor-intensive and expensive. With cuts in state budgets putting a squeeze on spending, it’s a tack that will be harder to pursue this winter.

For students, the evolution has meant less certainty. Colleges find themselves scrambling to explain the process to parents and high school guidance counselors who are newly anxious about a star student’s chances. “We try to be transparent, but still, the very nature of holistic review is not transparent,” says Christine N. Van Gieson, director of admissions at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “No one thing is going to get you in, and no one thing is going to get you out. The really top students don’t have a concern, but the middle group tends to worry.”

Santa Barbara is a vivid illustration of the swell of applications lapping against the gates of strong public universities, and the resulting increase in selectivity. In 1997, the campus admitted about 70 percent of 20,700 applicants. This fall it admitted less than half of 45,000 applicants. In the pecking order of the University of California, Santa Barbara isn’t even at the apex. (That is jointly occupied by Berkeley and Los Angeles, both of which admitted only 2 of every 10 applicants this year.)

At Santa Barbara, the comprehensive review process was implemented in the late 1990’s, and across the entire system in 2002. Susan A. Wilbur, the system’s director of undergraduate admissions, says it enables the selection committee to view applicants in light of their socio-­economic and educational backgrounds.

“We call this ‘achievement in context,’ ” she says. “We don’t want to compare a student who’s attending a well-resourced school with a student who may be attending a high school that offers few or no honors courses. That would be an apples-to-oranges comparison.”

THE broader lens tends to help students whose statistics — G.P.A., class rank, test score — are less impressive but who bring something extra to the table, say, a talent or success in overcoming an obstacle. “The pool of applicants who could benefit from holistic admissions is pretty large,” says David A. Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, “and certainly that includes low-income, racial and ethnic minority and first-generation students.” Minority students tend not to fare well on admissions exams.

One catalyst for holistic review is the desire for a diverse student body without quotas. In 2003, the Supreme Court essentially gave universities a framework for taking race into consideration. One landmark decision favored the holistic process used by the University of Michigan’s law school; another found its undergraduate admissions method, which used a system that gave points for race, unconstitutional. Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in the majority opinion of a “highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file” in which race is a factor but not “in a mechanical way.” Since then, Michigan voters have joined those in California, Washington and several other states in barring the use of race in college admissions.

The anti-affirmative-action activist Ward Connerly says that “many publics are converting to comprenhensive review in anticipation of the demise of race preferences.” He favors the approach but objects to what he calls attempts “to circumvent the Constitutional prohibition against the use of race” by admitting students who fall short on academic achievement.

As a regent of the University of California, Mr. Connerly also acted, he says, to “remove legacy and fat-cat preferences” as factors in admission. “If you’re going to have a system that rewards admission on the basis of individual achievements,” he explains, “I concluded that it would be hypocritical to eliminate race but to keep legacies or be admitted on the strength of some donor who wanted a friend to be admitted or a relative.”

Mr. Connerly was referring to the admission scandal that has roiled the University of Illinois’s Urbana-­Champaign campus in recent months. The Chicago Tribune uncovered a “clout list” of well-connected and sometimes unqualified applicants who were given special consideration; a state commission called the process “perhaps unparalleled among universities in its level of formality and structure.” In September, the university president resigned, and most trustees have been replaced.

Admissions preferences may also be at the root of a scandal at another prestigious public. With its ascension to Division I play, Binghamton University has faced a string of accusations involving the athletic department — including sexual harassment, academic fraud and drug dealing by a player — leading to an independent audit of the program. In an article in The New York Times in February, Dennis Lasser, who had served as a liaison between the athletic department and the admissions office, said the university had lowered its admissions standards to recruit basketball stars.

Still, the average SAT math/verbal score of the freshman class is an impressive 1290, up 16 points.

The flexibility of comprehensive review makes the notion of who stands to gain murky indeed. Officials say that factors like recommendations — from trustees, lawmakers or teachers — are weighed in the same spirit as other non­academic factors like community involvement, leadership and extracurricular activities. Legacy, too, can land an applicant in the yes column, with children of alumni having a slight edge.

In its annual surveys, the College Board asks what criteria are used, on a scale of “very important” to “important” to “considered,” including recommendations and “alumni relation.” Academics is invariably “very important.” But Binghamton, for example, regards recommendations as “important” and “considers” legacy status. Indiana University Bloomington “considers” both recommendations and legacy status.

“For students who are borderline, that’s something that will push them over the top,” says Roger J. Thompson, vice provost for enrollment management at Indiana Bloomington, referring to alumni relatives. “Likewise a strong letter of recommendation from a teacher or someone who knows the student well can make a difference. The most important thing is not particularly who sent it, but what it says about the student and his or her ability to succeed at your institution.”

How applications to Illinois’s flagship will be affected by the scandal remains to be seen. It received 26,000 applications for the current freshman class, a 20 percent increase over 2007. And it is on short lists this fall. “There’s always been interest in Champaign, always,” says Jim Conroy, chairman of the post-high-school counseling department of New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Ill.

In a shaky economy there is more interest than ever in public options, he says, as long as they’re flagships. “They want the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,” Mr. Conroy says. “They want the University of Wisconsin at Madison. They don’t want the branch universities, and that’s making these institutions even more competitive.”

Mr. Conroy says his students get a fairer shake with holistic review. New Trier offers 24 Advanced Placement courses, which means ample opportunity for students to challenge themselves, something admissions officers cite over and over as desirable. “This holistic process is giving both sides, whether you’re New Trier or inner-city high, a chance to express something that isn’t on a piece of paper or on a test score,” he says. “Everyone has a story, and now both ends — the rich and poor — get to express that.”

To some extent, a system that relies on test scores and grades is still in place. Most colleges will snag the students on the very top of the bell curve, based on their statistics. “When you see a student with 4.0 and a 1500 SAT, you don’t need a group of people to go down in a cave and wait for the smoke to come out,” Mr. Thompson says. “We’re not going to spend a lot of time reviewing those students.”

With an applicant pool that has grown to 33,000 from 21,000 in four years, the average SAT score of incoming freshmen at Indiana broke the 1200 threshold for the first time this fall, up 90 points in four years. Average G.P.A. has risen to 3.7 from 3.4.

The university has lately attracted high school seniors in the Northeast. “Indiana Bloomington has definitely entered the arena as a popular college choice at many of New York City’s private schools,” says Victoria Goldman, author of “The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools and Selective Public Schools.” “People feel they can get a really good education — and can gain admission.” Indiana admits 73 percent of applicants, and about 37 percent of undergraduates are not state residents.

The new profile was nurtured by its director of admissions, Mary Ellen Anderson, who for the last three years has made annual visits to about a dozen preparatory and private high schools in the New York region.

THE move toward holistic admissions comes as many institutions of higher education struggle with reduced budgets. The method is costly. The annual budget of the University of Washington’s admissions office grew by $250,000 to support the change. “We didn’t go to the Cadillac version, to be sure,” Mr. Ballinger says. “But we did have to do more hiring and really increase the staff during the application read season.” Five years ago, there were 15 to 20 readers during the peak period of December to March. That group has grown to about 70. “There’s training involved, and you have to assure that all these different readers are reading similarly,” Mr. Ballinger says. “It’s very time-consuming to make sure it’s being done well.”

Many admissions offices supplement their staffs by hiring high school guidance counselors during the busy months. But budget cuts at the University of Florida put an end to that practice during the last admissions cycle. “The admissions staff read a whole heck of a lot more, and we were more aggressive about recruiting the staff and faculty on our own campus to read applications,” says Zina L. Evans, the university’s associate provost for enrollment management and executive director of admissions. “It’s volunteer. They do this as good citizens of the university.”

At the University of California, which is in the throes of a severe budget crisis, the Santa Barbara campus is also prospecting for volunteer readers as a way to offset the impact of a hiring freeze. “We’re six full-time staff members short right now,” Ms. Van Gieson says. “We’re looking to cut corners without affecting the integrity of the process. It’s a lot of work.